


More or Less

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-16 04:33:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18513985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: M/S’s first case after they become intimate. Is it awkward, tense; are they distracted?





	More or Less

She’s waiting in the office and there’s something more about her. She’s grander. Luminous isn’t the right word but he knows wherever he follows her now it will be lighter, there’ll be more to see. His life has long been lived in the dark but he didn’t know just how blinded to the beauty of something as simple, as obvious, as the close company of another human being he’d become. Scully has cast a pool of something so brilliant around him that he feels like he’ll be walking in an eternal spotlight.

But he can’t say anything.

He nods in her direction as he walks to the filing cabinet. The handle is cool, the slides a little clunky as he pulls at it. Inside there are files. Dozens of Manila folders. Each one contains something of himself. A little part of his mind has been deposited into a report, a note in the margin. He’s expended so much energy into this work. What’s the expression? Heart and soul. He feels the tickle of a laugh behind his Adam’s apple. He touches it, the pointed crest. It feels different, new there. The skin has changed. It’s softer. His fingers fall to the files, in rowdy rows, and they are different too. They seem less.

Behind him, Scully is unlatching her case. Popping open her work with her usual precision. She’s meticulous. Now he knows just how so. Fastidious isn’t the right word. There’s something of the pedant in that descriptor. She’s careful, no. Specific, exact? Just right.

“Mulder?”

Even the way she speaks his name conveys her meaning with such detail. Tones and textures and inflections, the length of her inhalation or exhalation, these are the things that speak to him much more so than the words.

But he can’t say anything.

“Mulder?”

He pulls out the file. Everything about it is bland. Beige, unremarkable. On the desk it fades to nothing. Scully sits in her chair, lit up. Bright. His bottom lip sticks to his teeth and he feels it slip back. It’s fuller, plumper. Filled with blood. His veins are filled with more blood. More life. Yet his silence is louder. She is looking directly at him. She’s waiting.

“There’s a case.”

He wants to reply but when she leans forward he sees the powder on her nose and the outline of her lips that’s half a shade darker than the colour she’s applied. He can see the limbal ring around her iris, the perfect pupil, and marvels at the aqua against the black. She’s wearing a pale blue sweater, wool. It softens her whole being. He knows just how smooth she his, how velvety.

But he can’t say anything.

“Mulder? The case? Is it going to mean an overnight stay?”

She opens her mouth so he can see the tip of her tongue. Her hair falls forward as she moves her arms even further across the desk. The tips of her nails are whiter, rounder. There are lines across her knuckles that disappear when she bends her fingers. Her watch strap is a delicate chain of gold, each link looped through the next like an infinity symbol. A mathematical emblem but on her wrist it is a sign of something much less logical. Much more emotional.

He touches his nose with a bent finger. He’s always had a hatred for it, its size and width, the way it dominates his face, he’s always thought a chin should be strong, not a nose. But his morning it feels like it fits. It feels less obtrusive. More modest.

He knows just how modest she is, how demure. How she seeks permission with a slow blink of her eyes, her featherlight touches, her whispering lips. But he has also learned how she is bold and brave and intrepid. With her firm strokes and her deep kisses and her constant urging ‘muldermuldermulder’ like his name on her lips is sanction to open up, be free, be more.

“I thought we’d talked about that,” she says and he’s looking back at the edges of the folder where they bleed into the desk and the small gap where there is nothing of her until the tips of her fingers and the fine bones of the backs of her hands and the trim sleeves of her shirt under her jacket and the length of her arms to where her lapel covers the delicate lines of her collarbone and the column of her neck leads to the tuck under her ear where there’s a sweet spot that makes her nipples peak when you just even think about kissing her there.

She tucks her hair back behind her ear. Affords him a nod, a chance to speak.

But he can’t. He can’t find anything more to say. If he speaks, it will make it less. There is nothing he can add, nothing he would take away. Their perfect night. Their perfect love. It was more or less where they’d been heading. Now life will be more. Never less again.


End file.
